Prior art twist beam rear suspensions are known, which are light and cost efficient and which provide geometrical packaging advantages. They have drawbacks such as low lateral stiffness, lateral force oversteer, brake force oversteer, low longitudinal compliance and unfavorable geometry as trajectory angle and anti-lift angle.
An example of a suspended axle with control of the steering angle is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,891,674. The flexible axle connect wheel carriers provided on the axle. Each wheel carrier comprises a rigid mounting plate which bears two substantially vertical pivots. The location of the pivots dictates the steering angle. Each vertical pivot comprises elastic articulations, which are provided on the wheel carrier. An elastically deformable element is interposed between the interior surface of each housing and the exterior surface of the hole and a rigid component. The structure of the elastic articulation is dimensioned to minimize steering torque. A drawback with the axle according to U.S. Pat. No. 7,891,674 is that the included details such as ball joints and bushings, which are designed to hold knuckle in a preferred geometry are expensive. Another drawback is that the joints and the bushings induce an extra weight to the design of the axle.
In the above prior art the values of lateral force understeer and brake force understeer depend on specific bushing stiffness' and the position of the virtual king-pin axis.
The wheel carrier according to the invention are able to tune values for lateral stiffness, longitudinal stiffness, lateral force understeer and brake force understeer by means of the properties of the design and material chosen for the wheel carrier.